Contrary to the expectations of its founder, the Anglican priest John Wesley (1703–1791), Methodism developed into the most successful and most influential religious movement of nineteenth-century America. By 1820 a host of itinerant and local preachers—most notably Francis Asbury (1745–1816; "The Father of American Methodism"), Richard Allen (1760–1831), and "Crazy" Lorenzo Dow (1777–1834)—had converted some 250,000 individuals to the Methodist faith. Only twenty years later, Methodist membership totaled 900,000 and surged to roughly 1,500,000 in the mid-1850s when the various branches of the Methodist Church had consolidated their position as the fastest growing and largest religious denomination in the United States. Under the auspices of official Methodist presses such as the Methodist Book Concerns in Philadelphia (1789), New York (1804), Cincinnati (1820), and Nashville (1854) as well as the New York Methodist Tract...